Rechnitz, and The Merchants Contracts

Elfriede Jelinek

Translated by Gitta Honegger

 

6 x 7.5 inches, 240pp, 10 halftones, 1 DVD. March 2015

ISBN : 9780857422255

Rs  950.00 (PB)
$45.00 (PB)
£31.50 (PB)

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For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contemporary literature was finally recognized in 2004 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The committee acknowledged Jelinek’s groundbreaking work that offers a “musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” Although she is an internationally recognized playwright, Jelinek’s work is difficult to find in English, which makes this new volume, which includes Rechnitz: The Exterminating Angel  and The Merchant’s Contracts, all the more valuable. 

 

In Rechnitz, a chorus of messengers reports on the circumstances of the massacre of 180 Jews, an actual historical event that took place near the Austrian/Hungarian border town of Rechnitz. More than a docu-drama, this work explores the very transmission of historic memory and has been called Jelinek’s best performance text to date. In The Merchant’s Contracts, Jelinek brings us a comedy of economics, where the babble and media spin of spectators leave small investors alienated and bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In the age of the global economy, Jelinek turns the story of a merchant of Vienna into a universal comedy of errors, making this her most accessible work.

 

Along with an extensive introduction by the translator that both contextualizes and analyzes the two brilliant texts, a DVD of performances of both plays accompanies this volume. Available for the first time in English, this is a collection that testifies to the power and universality of Jelinek’s work.

Elfriede Jelinek’s most famous novels are Lust (1989) and The Children of the Dead (1995). Her novels and plays have been translated into more than 30 languages. With relatively few of her texts translated into English, she is best known for Michael Haneke’s award-winning 2001 film version of her 1983 novel The Piano Teacher, starring Isabelle Huppert. 

 

Gitta Honegger has also translated plays by Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Franz Xaver Kroetz and Marieluise Fleißer, among others. She has been resident dramaturge and stage director at the Yale Repertory Theatre and a professor of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama. She is currently a professor of theatre at Arizona State University. 

Theatre And Performance Studies
Playscript
In Performance